From gloom to dispair

In little more than a decade, the cosy world of Anglo-American crime fiction has been transformed by wave after wave of Scandinavian invaders. Some, like Steig Larsson, are suddenly parachuted into the bestseller lists almost before we have had time to become aware of their existence. Others, like Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason and Norway’s Karin Fossum, advance steadily but less dramatically in terms of sales and critical plaudits. And then there’s Henning Mankell, the Swedish commander-in-chief of the invading forces, who deserves a category to himself.

He is a distinguished playwright, publisher and children’s author, who has a long and honourable record of supporting charitable causes, especially in Africa. But he is best known as the creator of the lugubrious Inspector Kurt Wallender, whose career unfolds over ten novels. Wallender’s popularity is international. An astonishing tribute to his success is the fact that the British dramatisation of Wallender, starring Kenneth Branagh, was shown on BBC1 this winter in tandem with one of Sweden’s Wallender film series on BBC4 (Sweden has two of them).

Wallender, it must be said, is not a barrel of laughs. In fact he’s a barrel of gloom. His father mocks him for becoming a policeman. He narrowly survives a knifing by a drunk. He’s been sued for brutality. His wife leaves him. His daughter tries to commit suicide. He’s haunted by the knowledge that he accidentally killed an innocent man. He’s a diabetic, with an unhappy dependence on alcohol and junk food. And, to cap it all, by the end of his career he’s on the borders of Alzheimer’s disease.

Moreover, his profession plunges him into the murkiest depths of modern Swedish society, from child abuse to technocrime. There’s little glamour or excitement — not for Wallender the high-tech forensics and turbo-charged car chases of so much American crime fiction.